One thing you can say about politics – it's forever exciting. For all our complaints about its apparent dysfunction, “gotcha-ism” and ineffectiveness, research is revealing that we are increasingly becoming fascinated with it through the media.  Ironically, it proves the old adage that “effective politics is boring.”  It's a sure sign that democracy is undergoing a transformation when our daily news coverage is dominated by hyper-partisanship, purposeful disruption, the rise of extremism, the election of out-sized political leaders, and scandal.  Lots of effective politics is going on but it's drowned out by the sensational.Yet one of the great dangers of covering politics “in the moment” is how we quickly lose track of the longer, deeper story.  Democracy is in trouble.  And, for all our belief that it's merely hit a bump in the road, it's likely that we know better.  We remain transfixed while feeling incapable of doing anything about it.  As James Britton put it a few years ago:"Experience is kaleidoscopic: the experience of every moment is unique and unrepeatable. Until we can group items in it on the basis of their similarity we can set up no expectations, make no predictions: lacking these we can make nothing of the present moment."So, let's “group” some of the larger developments in an attempt to get a larger picture.  The narrative appears to be heading in one key direction.Historians remind us that democracy has developed in three mains stages.  The first followed the French and American revolutions, when 29 countries chose to become democratic, up until 1922.  But, with the rise of Nazism and Communism, the number fell back to 22.World War Two altered the balances of power in the world, with democracy spreading to India, African nations, and others, to the point where the Pew Research Centre says that 6 out of 10 nations today claim to be democratic.But that's something of a ruse.  We have now entered the third and most troubling stage of democracy's story.  Recent years have seen a marked decline.  The annual Democracy Index Report looks at governments around the world and tracks their elections, politics, culture and civil rights.  This year they concluded that there are only 19 full democracies around the world.  All of the 89 democratic nations researched declined from last year and one-third of those supposed democracies are now run by authoritarian rulers and governments.  While the study concluded that democracy itself isn't in freefall, it is in serious decline.Something is clearly going on here but is rarely spoken of by politicians.  And the media seem too busy covering all the shenanigans the political world offers at the moment to help give us an accurate read of the increasing threat to a more or less stable democratic order that emerged following the Second World War.  As the authors of The Emergence of American Political Issues, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw concluded:  “The news media may not be successfully telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful at telling us what to think about.”The book is also instructive in reminding us that politicians frequently become nearsighted in their quest for people's attention:  "To a considerable degree the art of politics in a democracy is the art of determining which issue dimensions are of major interest to the public or can be made salient in order to win public support."  It's revealing that the book was published back in 1977, a generation ago, and that the signs of danger it described have exploded in recent years.All of this colludes to keep citizens blithely unaware that the democratic order most of us have known is being threatened across the globe.  The most successful political concept to come out of the 20th century is now in trouble.  The authoritarian thugs thrown out by democracy in recent years have been replaced by opponents that can't stop the reversal.  And established democracies, like those in Europe and North America, have proved unable or unwilling to tackle the flaws in their systems that disillusion their citizens.It is remarkable to remember that it was less than 20 years ago that representatives from the democratic countries of the world gathered for the World Forum on Democracy in Warsaw to celebrate “the will of the people as the basis of the authority of government.”  They went on to add that, with the failed experiments of authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government, “it seems that now, at long last, democracy is triumphant.”The world is changing, with even stable countries like Canada feeling the pressure of inner divisions and the emergence of authoritarians more than willing to shake up our constitutional stability in order to achieve their ends.  That's the story of the world at present, and our fascination with “in the moment” politics is keeping us from the reforms required to recover our democratic health.Glen Pearson was a career professional firefighter and is a former Member of Parliament from southwestern Ontario.  He and his wife adopted three children from South Sudan and reside in London, Ontario.  He has been the co-director of the London Food Bank for 32 years.  He writes regularly for the London Free Press and also shares his views on a blog entitled “The Parallel Parliament“.   Follow him on twitter @GlenPearson.